THE equal rights amendment is simple and, it would seem, utterly innocuous: "Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex."

When it was approved by the House and Senate and sent to the states for ratification in March 1972, its success seemed assured. Thirty state legislatures ratified the amendment within a year. Presidents Nixon, Ford and Carter all lent their support. Yet in 1982 the E.R.A. died, just a few states short of ratification. By then, it had become linked in the public mind with military conscription for 18-year-old girls, coed bathrooms and homosexual rights. That public relations coup was largely the work of one clever, charming, ambitious, energetic and forever ladylike woman: Phyllis Schlafly.

Schlafly has, for the better part of the past 50 years, been a one-woman right-wing communications empire. Through her speeches, books, radio addresses and monthly newsletter, The Phyllis Schlafly Report, she has supported the nuclear arms race, Barry Goldwater, the Strategic Defense Initiative and phonics, and has bashed whole language learning, Communism at home and abroad, strategic arms limitation treaties, Nixon's diplomatic overtures to China, Nelson Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger, Roe v. Wade and "Eastern elites." And, as Donald T. Critchlow attests in this biography, "Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman's Crusade," she saved special venom for the "anti-family, anti-children, and pro-abortion" feminist movement.

Schlafly founded her (eventually) powerful Eagle Forum in 1975 as "the alternative to women's lib." She opposed the E.R.A. on the grounds that it would take away the "special protection" the "Christian tradition of chivalry" offered women -- in other words, the "right" to be "supported and protected" by men. "Those women lawyers, women legislators, and women executives promoting E.R.A. have plenty of education and talent to get whatever they want in the business, political and academic world," is how one anti-E.R.A. letter distributed to Ohio state legislators put it. "We, the wives and working women, need you, dear Senators and Representatives, to protect us."

Not too surprisingly, Betty Friedan once said she'd like to burn Schlafly at the stake. A demonstrator threw a pie in her face. And despite the fact that her widely read campaign book "A Choice Not an Echo" helped secure him the presidential nomination, Goldwater kept Schlafly at arm's length in his 1964 campaign. She was, some of his advisers felt, just too conservative.

In many ways, Phyllis Schlalfy, née Stewart, would seem an unlikely candidate for a life spent on the antifeminist front lines. She was raised in St. Louis by a working mother who kept her family afloat after her husband lost his job in the Great Depression. She was encouraged to excel academically by both her parents, who, Critchlow writes, believed "their daughters should not be any less ambitious or educated than boys."

Schlafly received a four-year scholarship to a local Roman Catholic college, but left after a year because it wasn't sufficiently challenging. Instead, she decided to pay her own way through Washington University by taking on a full-time job firing rifles and machine guns to test ammunition at the St. Louis Ordnance Plant. She worked night shifts -- 4 p.m. to midnight or midnight to 8 a.m. -- and then attended morning classes. She graduated early, made Phi Beta Kappa and called the ordeal "the most wonderful two years of my life, a beautiful experience."

Schlafly got a master's degree from Radcliffe, established herself professionally and achieved economic self-sufficiency, then married a St. Louis man with whom she bonded intellectually. (They took an extra suitcase of books along for the honeymoon.) Comfortably settled in a mansion in Fairmount, Ill., she had six children and rose to national prominence, first as an ardent anti-Communist, then as an antifeminist crusader.

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Why would such an independent-minded, ambitious, self-motivated and capable woman devote so much effort to making sure that members of her sex would benefit from their dependence upon men? How could Schlafly reconcile her professed anti-elitism and opposition to day care with the fact that, although presenting herself as a traditional wife and mother, she ran for Congress twice, campaigned hard for Goldwater, crisscrossed the country speaking out for conservative causes, wrote more than a dozen books and enjoyed the services of a housekeeper who stayed with her family for 26 years?

There are no answers to be found in "Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism" because, despite having had access to Schlafly's personal papers and having benefited from occasional conversations with Schlafly about those papers, Critchlow has no particular feel for her as a woman. More generally, he lacks critical distance and scholarly skepticism.

He is particularly indulgent of Schlafly and her Christian conservative allies when they engage in quite un-Christian behavior. When, for example, Schlafly and other "moral conservatives" revolted at the 1960 Republican convention after Richard Nixon supported a civil rights plank (proposed by Nelson Rockefeller) demanding "aggressive action" against segregation and discrimination, Critchlow is quick to defend them. "The difference between the Rockefeller plank and the original civil rights plank actually was not very much," he asserts, "and probably most Republicans agreed" with the antidiscrimination provision. They were against it only because "conservatives were going to oppose whatever Rockefeller proposed." (Critchlow doesn't set the bar too high in these matters. He suggests that drawing attention to Goldwater's vote against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 is "unfair," and extols Senator Strom Thurmond's comparatively "liberal views on race" in his early political career in South Carolina.)

Critchlow does note that Schlafly, like many other hard-right conservatives, has long been preoccupied with certain "well-financed" minorities -- "Eastern Establishment" elites with "internationalist" viewpoints who "shared strategies to expand their political and financial influence." For her, these elites are epitomized by Henry Kissinger, whom Schlafly and her co-author, Rear Adm. Chester Ward, described in the final pages of their 1975 polemic, "Kissinger on the Couch," in this fashion: "Henry, say some who know him well, has no God. Does he have a country?"

Critchlow points out that Schlafly "never identified Jews as part of any conspiracy," but then she didn't have to: phrases that invoke godless, countryless "well-financed" minorities are a well-recognized code among those who fear world domination by Wall Street and the Trilateral Commission. But Critchlow, a professor of history at St. Louis University, lets all this wink-winking go on without comment.

Because Critchlow essentially speaks the same language as Schlafly and her cohort, unquestioningly using terms like "moral" and "Christian" and "pro-family," it'sdifficult to grant his book the objective authority to which it aspires. Critchlow can't begin to answer the more profound questions Schlafly's life and work raise because, for him, her answer -- that she's living in step with traditional Christian values -- is sufficient. Such words appear to be as rich in meaning for him as they are for Schlafly and the grass-roots right she represents. But for secular readers -- or for those who define words like "religion" and "morality" or even "values" differently -- they amount to an intellectual void.

'Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman's Crusade,' by Donald T. Critchlow Judith Warner is the host of "The Judith Warner Show" on XM satellite radio. She is the author, most recently, of "Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety."